For the last four years Blue Skys studios have provided an ideal working space for recent U of A Art and Design graduates. Blue Skys is currently the studio home of MFA graduates Kim Sala, Brenda Christiansen, Scott Cumberland, Lindsay Knox and Alma Visscher. Along with earlier tenants Sherri Chaba, Anna House and Yan Geng, these artists have found this a perfect home base where they can develop viable post graduate art practices and extend the camaraderie and artistic dialogue from their student days.
In early 2009 a group of MFA students, all on the verge of graduation, found themselves in an all too common predicament: what to do about their imminent departure from the studio spaces on campus. Their solution, however, was far from common. Today the Blue Skys studio just west of downtown Edmonton is home to a close-knit group of artists whose shared educational experience provided the grounding for a more permanent venture. Having already formed valuable working relationships, the question of what to do after graduation was openly discussed. Rather than part ways and go off in separate directions, the value of working together and continuing their dialogue motivated the search for an off-campus studio that all could share. Individually this would be an expensive proposition, but by sharing costs it became a graspable reality. Kim Sala undertook the footwork and looked at several potential sites.
Many of the locations Sala visited suffered from low ceilings, and the need for extensive renovations. But she finally hit the jackpot when she met Bruce Daniluck, whose tenants had recently vacated a far more manageable site. The second-floor warehouse space now occupied by Blue Skys was once home to a sportswear manufacturer, from which it takes its name. The history of that business, even though the equipment has been cleared away, is retained in the deep impressions left in the concrete floor by years and years of toiling feet working the pedals of industrial sewing machines. Daniluck was at first uncertain what to do with the space, when Sala suggested that it be renovated into art studios. He worked with the artists to install walls and lighting to their specifications. Instead of a typical central passage with cubicles off to the sides, creating an unusable traffic corridor, a "golden path" maximizes wall space as well as usable floor area. The individual spaces are large with high ceilings and, while the arrangement affords some privacy, it also encourages dialogue by forcing traffic through the studios. Daniluck has maintained an active interest in the studio and the larger community in which it is situated, and is currently organizing an art residency in Mexico.
The neighbourhood itself, a three-block wide strip of small warehouses, has seen many changes since its days as a light-industrial zone adjacent to the old CP railyards. The removal of the tracks and opening of Grant MacEwan's downtown campus in the 90s initiated a widespread, long-term revitalisation. Sandwiched between the Queen Mary Park and Oliver residential areas, these warehouses are becoming more and more valued for small business opportunities - including several new galleries - keeping the area active and diverse. At the same time, the effects of gentrification have been staved off, despite the proximity of new condominium units. All the neighbourhood lacks is pedestrian access: sidewalks are intermittent and there are few links between the surrounding residential communities.
Sala now works as a sessional instructor at U of A. She says that the constant interaction in a shared studio encourages productivity and artistic growth. Sala graduated in 2009 with her show Soundscapes, a series of abstract paintings inspired by music. Her current process-oriented works are built with layers of "creation and destruction," resulting in an interplay of mark-making and evidence of the removal of marks.
Brenda Kim Christiansen graduated in 2008 and has also taught at the university. Her landscape paintings have begun to be encroached by wildlife, and with their expressionist colours they evoke a feeling somewhere between a faded photograph and a memory. Her exhibition Twice Removed opened in November at the Multicultural Heritage Centre in Stony Plain. As a member of the Coyotes Artist Collective, her work is also part of a travelling exhibit, Facing North, which is currently in Yellowknife at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre.
Facing North: Coyotes Artist Collective, Landscape Art Show
Scott Cumberland has taught painting at the U of A since completing his MFA in 2007. The studio space is filled with his large abstract paintings which present colourful and exuberant ribbon forms in relation with geometric forms and solid or mottled areas of colour. Related to these are his small "Sweet Suite" charcoal drawings, which continue the motif of the ribbon but in an exquisitely modulated tonal range. Cumberland is currently preparing for an exhibition at Edmonton's Peter Robertson Gallery.
Sweet Suite: Drawing 56, 2010, charcoal on paper
Lindsay Knox and Alma Visscher are relatively new members. Graduating in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Knox and Visscher were welcomed to fill in the vacant slots at Blue Skys. Lindsay Knox is a graduate of the Art and Design intermedia program. She was featured in the inaugural exhibition New Alberta Contemporaries at the Esker Foundation in Calgary.
Alma Visscher, also a graduate of drawing and intermedia came to Blue Skys in September of 2012. Her MFA exhibition, Garden of Forking Paths, was featured at the FAB Gallery in November of 2011. Visscher and Knox's recent exhibition, Internal Dwellings, was shown in Calgary at the Truck gallery's +15 satellite space.
Internal Dwellings
Membership in Blue Skys has seen some changes over the last few years. Yan Geng, who graduated in painting in 2009, relocated to Vancouver last year. Though ostensibly abstract, his painting maintains a visual dialectic relationship with representation through the removal of faces, and more recently with the creation of landscape imagery using the nomenclature of abstract mark-making.
Though no longer a Bly Sky tenant, much of the work that Anna House presented in her final thesis exhibition, Dialogue of the Domestic in 2010, was prepared or stored prior to display at Bly Sky. A combination of realistic painting and installation, her graduating show was capped with a recreation of a dining room, delicately covered in its entirety with icing and fondant. Her earlier career as a professional chef informed much of her work technically and thematically.
Sherri Chaba also left Blue Skys recently. Chaba graduated in 2007 in drawing and intermedia, and is currently featured, with other department members (staff and students), in The News From Here, the current Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art at the AGA.